


Two Columns

by goodnicepeople



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, M/M, Minor Violence, and this is meant to be about healing if you're willing to believe me, grief and coping, nothing 'on screen' so to speak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 21:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9402944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnicepeople/pseuds/goodnicepeople
Summary: I didn’t plan to outlive you, Taako thinks.Who?some other part of him supplies. And the answer to that question is either “everyone” or “anyone” and both answers are infuriating.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Boy, I hemmed and hawed about sharing this one as I am mostly anti any fiction that uses death to make other characters "feel things" so I hesitated that this may come across as the same. I hope not. I hope it feels more about making the best of time you have, and maybe a bit about the isolation and togetherness of coping. Things that don't feel sad so much as inevitable, and ultimately okay.
> 
> There's a brief moment of physical violence of someone lashing out angrily. Want to warn appropriately!

There’s a half-finished gazebo in their backyard.

There’s a half-finished gazebo; just the base and then two standing columns. Caught frozen, reaching up towards the sky, no matter the weather, no matter the time of year. Taako thinks there’s something a little eerie about them. Something that reminds him a bit of outstretched arms when he catches them illuminated by a dimming light.

Regardless, it isn’t going anywhere. There’s a half-finished gazebo in their backyard, and there will be until they pass on, or just get very old, or whatever it is that’s going to happen to them. Taako keeps denying that conversation. He has time to have it, eventually. More than enough time.

I’m so sorry, Magnus had said. I don’t think. I don’t think I’ll be able to -

Ashamed, is how Taako remembers him looking as he’d said that. Piteous and hunched and defeated. His body large but weaker now than it was. Losing time had always left him feeling a little dry. That’s what he’d called it. Not painful. Just dried up. It’s not how he’d like to remember Magnus, when he does recall him. That isn’t how he was.

But, he had said it: I’m sorry, I wanted to. For your wedding. I wanted to see you both married under there.

He covered his face with his palms and asked Taako to please not look at him, for a second. Magnus, who usually cried so freely, unabashedly. Please, just for a second, I don’t want you to -

Maybe I should have looked away, Taako thinks. He wouldn’t have to have seen it, wouldn’t have to keep this memory for the next four hundred years of his life.

Magnus is still at the wedding, of course. Beaming and weeping in alternating waves and, often, at the exact same time.

Taako said, “Kravitz, I don’t remember my family, but if I was ever gonna have another, you’re better than anything I could’ve dreamt up.” Magnus hiccuped somewhere behind him, holding the ring in trembling hands. Kravitz’s warm, warm smile when his cool hands reached out to take Taako’s in his own.

“Yes, family,” Kravitz replied, in a shellshocked sort of way. His expression one of disbelief and immense, blissful gratitude. He keeps that look on his face all night. Throughout the service, the dinner, the dancing, the moment they steal away to kiss behind a tree and whisper, _this was a good idea_.

The night ends with Magnus and Taako on that unfinished gazebo with some secreted-away slices of cake, sitting side by side on an unpainted segment of bench. Taako kicks off his shoes.

“I’d better get Ango home,” Magnus says, looking up past where a roof should be, up at a fine array of stars in a dark, dark sky. “Leave you two newlyweds up to what it is newlyweds do.”

Taako makes a retching noise.

“Mags, gross,” he scolds. “You’re not old enough to know stuff like that.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Magnus laughs, scrubbing his hands over his tired face, leaving his beard mussed. “I must be thinking of something else, then.”

A pause. Magnus taps his open palm on the bench between them.

“This is gonna be nice someday,” he says, with a confidence and bravado Taako doesn’t hear all that much anymore. “It’ll take me a while, but it’s gonna be nice. You can have kids run around in here.”

“Don’t pressure me, bucko,” Taako warns. “No kid talk. No begging. No -- fuckin’ -- woodworking cribs. _Capiche_?”

“Oh, a bug!” Angus exclaims from somewhere in the distance. “Merle! Merle, wake up! It’s in your beard!”

Taako laughs hard. As hard as he can ever remember laughing. One hand clutched around his aching midsection, the other gripping Magnus’ knee.

Magnus liked shit like that. Hands and touching and stuff.

Merle said something like that, when he talked about Magnus. No podiums or temples or anything like that. Just a few people on Taako and Kravtiz’s couches, and even then Taako had packed it in early and slunk upstairs without so much as a word.

Merle stayed behind for days after everyone else had dispersed, leaving food and condolences and other living things that wither. Took up a perch sitting beside Taako on his bed, just behind his hip. Rarely touching but breathing heavy, or humming something mostly tuneless under his breath. Reassuring in his solidity and presence.

Taako thinks he and Merle don’t really work to stay close. It seems unfair, but he doesn’t know how to explain what he means by that. It’s the kind of thought he couldn’t ever really voice aloud for fear of it being misconstrued. But he and Merle are much alike,  preferring to show affection in their loyalty and patience, when they historically are neither loyal nor patient. Merle once had touched Taako’s shoulder and said, “you know, you’re as much my boy as Mookie is, and there ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t drop to run right to ya,” and that’d been almost too much to bear. The white-hot intensity of that earnestness, that inarguably shared sentiment. It threatens to tip what they’ve worked to keep unshakable. Taako knows Merle’s telling the truth. Taako knows he’d do the same.

Merle had cried a lot, though. Merle had cried his voice hoarse.

Still, though. Sat with him on the bed. Tidied up the house when he could, though Kravitz mostly took care of things like that.

“I just don’t want to leave ‘im, yet,” Merle had said, apologetically, watching Kravitz settle on the couch for another night. But Merle hadn’t wanted to leave yet, either. Coming back - whenever that happened - would be hard. He isn’t sure he’s ready to consider that yet.

“Darling,” Kravitz entreats gently. Even more often now than ever before, when hauling Taako out of bed was somewhat of a playful stand-off, met with threats and rewards in equal measure. “Darling, come walk with me. Or let’s sit outside on the porch.”

Running fingers through his hair in the dark. Kissing his shoulder.

“Do you remember what you said, when we ran off for a bit? On our wedding night? We hid behind the oak tree. You wouldn’t take your hand off my thigh, you kept trying to unbuckle my belt.”

“This was a good idea,” Taako answers. His voice sounding hollow from disuse. Kravitz chuckles, leans down to kiss the slant of his cheekbone.

“Yes,” he breathes. “Exactly.” And then a long pause. “Do you still feel that way, darling?”

Kravitz who is sweet. Kravitz who is nervous. Kravitz who is delightfully unhinged behind closed doors. Kravitz who, no matter what, will not be the first to leave him. That perhaps is Taako’s greatest comfort.

“Absolutely,” Taako answers. He turns over and looks up at his husband, handsome and appealing, framed by the dim light of an open window. He reaches up his arms, asking for an embrace that Kravitz is all too happy to give. He is cool against his skin, which Taako has always liked, but likes even more now, in his stark contrasts. Thin, bony shoulder blades. A quiet, melodic voice. Skin cold and soft, like tracing fingers over the unmoving surface of a pond. Kravitz likes this kind of shit. Hands and touching and stuff. Luckily, there’s not a thing. Not a thing about him that reminds Taako of -  

Time, and time, and time. Taako has hardly any idea how much. He has so much of it to get through yet. He sleeps often, or stands and plods to the kitchen to cook while Kravitz talks in a low, comforting drone somewhere behind him.

Angus visits at the end of his school year. He’s been awarded some prestigious grant -- something about his academic performance as a teacher and his field work. He talks so excitedly that he’s often hard to follow. But it does get Taako out of bed and into nice clothes. It’s an old habit, one he’ll never shake, he supposes, but he wants Angus to admire him. To see him as unshakably excellent, when so few others hold him in such high esteem.

He kisses Angus’ cheeks like he’s still eleven. Takes his coat and ushers him into the kitchen and tries to make him laugh. He always does so easily. Peals of that delightedly, barely restrained guffawing behind a polite hand. It’s good. It’s good. Having someone around who likes to laugh, who acquiesces to Taako’s petty whims, who wants to express their affection so broadly and so unabashedly. What does it matter if it’s merely clumsy patching over some other hole he’s refusing to acknowledge. It’s good. It’s good.

Angus turns their attention there, though. Eventually. Over their dinner, his eyes suddenly tearful.

“I found a wooden bowl he’d carved in the back of the cabinet and,” Angus pauses, as his voice pitches too high and breaks. He exhales and begins again, “I guess it just took me by surprise. That’s when it’s hardest, I suppose. When I’m not expecting to stumble on him. Do you know what I mean?”

Taako does not, so he says nothing.

“When we were preparing his house for me to move in, sort of take it over, he kept touring me around like I’d never seen it before. It was really sweet.”

There’s a part of Taako that wants to urge him to shut up. Digging his earnest fingers into a wound Taako pointedly pretends isn’t there. Recalling Magnus in such sweet, vivid detail that it feels more teasing than anything else.

“Once he told me, he started carving trinkets for me to find around the place - ”

“Hold up,” Taako says, accidentally slamming his fist down against the dinner table so hard, their glasses of water jump. “Hold up, kiddo. Told you? Told you _what_?”

“Taako,” Angus says, quietly, in a mature way Taako instantly resents.

“No,” he persists. “Are you trying to tell me you knew - ?”

“No, sir - _Taako_ \- ” he quickly corrects himself, still, after all these years, when he’s nervous. “It’s more so that, ah.”

His nervous hedging foretells something Taako isn’t going to want to hear.

“I suppose we’d talked about it,” Angus says. “What would happen, when it happened. That he figured it might be sooner than not.”

Taako hears a clatter and distantly realizes his fork has fallen out of his hand.

“Sorry?”

“It’s. Well.” Angus clears his throat, ringing his napkin between his sweaty palms. “He left everything to me, right? So I’d always have a place to live, and money if I started a family. So when - when - when he began to _suspect…_ well, we had some things to get in order.”

“Had you known for a long time?” Taako asks, deathly calm.

Angus shakes his head.

“No. Not long. Just… enough.”

Taako supposes he has no idea what time means, anyway. A long time, enough time. What did that amount to? What did that fix? He cleans up dinner. He holds Angus beside him on the couch in silence. He sends Angus off in a carriage he pays for and makes Angus promise to call when he’s home safe, as if he were still a kid. Because it feels good. Caught in amber, precious and unmoving.

“Did you know it was going to happen?” Taako asks Kravitz later, beside him in their bed.

“Pardon?”

“Did you know. About Magnus. Don’t lie.”

“No,” Kravitz answers. “I -- I used to have answers like that. When I’d keep tabs on people. But that’s not something I do anymore. It’s not something I really have access to.”

It sounds true enough, so Taako doesn’t press any further. You should’ve looked, he almost wants to say. Since apparently he wasn’t going to tell me on his own.

In his dream that night, Magnus smiles so wide, Taako can see the space where he’s missing a tooth. Taako wakes so distraught his hands are shaking. He walks the house and walks the house and sees the gazebo from the kitchen window and walks until the sun dots in through the yellow curtains.

I didn’t plan to outlive you, Taako thinks.

 _Who?_ some other part of him supplies. And the answer to that question is either “everyone” or “anyone” and both answers are infuriating. Why bother? Why bother with any of it, when he can’t keep any part of it?

He isn’t sure how it happens, but suddenly one day he and Kravitz are shouting. Kravitz doesn’t shout, but he’s shouting. Pleading with Taako to get out of bed, when Taako hissed and kicked him square in the chest, connecting hard with his sternum and sending him sprawling back.

“I can’t help you, I can’t help you!” Kravitz snaps. “When you get like this -- !”

And then they’re shouting. Taako buries his face in his pillow and barks a short, wordless sound. One that tears out of him like it had roots deep in his guts.

“I’m not asking for it,” Taako yelps. “So stop trying!”

“How am I supposed to sit here and watch this?” Kravitz pleads, his voice wavering. “I love you.”

Taako keeps his face smothered. He thinks he might cry. He thinks he might already be crying. Kravitz doesn’t need to see that.

“Taako,” he entreats, and Taako feels his hand alight, gentle, atop the small of his back. “It -- it’s been a very long time.”

“Not long enough I guess, m’dude,” he drawls into the pillow as a riposte.

Kravitz sighs, long and weighty. Heavy with something he doesn’t want to say.

“I want to ask you something,” he says, very slowly. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”

Taako says nothing, spitefully.

“Were you -- and Taako, if the answer is yes, it’s okay, I’m not angry in the slightest.” He hears Kravitz swallow, which seems so incredibly silly for a man who doesn’t need to swallow or blink or any of the things Kravitz does. “But were you -- were you and Magnus? I know you loved him deeply but… was it…?”

Taako snaps up and pushes Kravitz hard, one hand firm and painful right between his ribs, the other over his sharp collarbone.

“How fucking -- ! How could you ask me that?”

“I’m sorry.”

He kicks at Kravitz’s legs on the bed. Knows he’s being unfairly cruel but can’t help it.

“I mean really, _fuck_ you. Just because you don’t get it, because you were dead for so long you forgot what it felt like to have friends. Doesn’t mean that I harbored some fucking -- ”

“Stop!” Kravitz snaps, reeling away from him. “This is -- Taako, I’m trying to _talk_ to you!”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”

“He was my friend too, Taako,” Kravitz says, more pleadingly. “I know it isn’t the same but I do sympathize, if not understand. If you can believe that.”

Taako crushes the pillow to his chest and curls up away from Kravitz, his eyes jammed shut. Willing him away. Willing this conversation over.

“I’m unhappy. I miss him. Gods know how you must feel, then. But Taako. It’s been nearly a year.”

That’s like a slap. A year. A _year._

An insignificant iota of time, in his timeline. In the amount of time he’s yet to trek.

A year?

How had it gone by so quickly? A year and they’d nearly saved the world. A year and Magnus’ dog had grown taller than his knee. Angus voice changed. Merle’s daughter turned eighteen and took over the family business. His years had been bright and busy things, packed tight, end to end, with things worth remembering and things he’d rather forget, but things nonetheless.

Gods. When was the last time he went into Neverwinter to pick up root vegetables from that old woman with the nicely painted nails? Or even outside to Kravitz’s garden out front? Were there wisteria blooming on the porch?

“Darling,” Kravitz says, running his thumb over Taako’s cheek. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

Taako’s throat is tight, but he hums, once, to acknowledge he’s listening.

“I felt. I mean, I _feel_ …” Kravitz clears his throat. “I’m embarrassed to say this. I’m afraid the only reason you still want me around is because I’ll never - I mean I _can’t_ ever - ”

“That isn’t true,” Taako blurts out, like the words are shaken out of him violently. “I-I’m sorry.”

“I love you,” Kravitz says.

“Yeah. I love you,” Taako answers. “Yeah. I -- a lot. Krav. A lot. Not just because you won’t -- won’t leave me.”

“And I’m not trying to _hurry_ you, darling.” Kravitz says. Taako can feel the bed shift beside him. Kravitz laying down behind him. Threading one hand around his waist. “I feel terrible. There’s so little I can do for you.”

“What’s your garden look like?” Taako asks, a bit abruptly.

“Great,” Kravitz answers, after a brief and noticeable moment to adjust to the whiplash. “The lettuce heads are gigantic.”

Taako laughs at that odd detail, the things Kravitz chooses to pay attention to. A familiar habit. One he loves, one he’d loved. In Magnus. Whose name he suddenly very terribly wants to say aloud. Instead, he forces a smile, and begins to sit up.

“I wanna go see them,” Taako says. “C’mon.”

In time, he’ll see him again. In time.

_And here’s where I’ll carve out some lattice, get some ivy growing up the sides. This thing’ll be a real looker, Taako. Your neighbors are gonna want a gazebo, too._

_I don’t really have neighbors, bub. If you haven’t noticed._

_I’m just sayin’. This gazebo? It’s gonna be… !_

_Ugh, I hate that._

_What?_

_When you do that loud whistle through your teeth?_

_What - this one?_

_Yes, that. Magnus. You sound like a tea kettle. Ah -- fuck, dude, my ribs! Put me down!_

_Sorry._

_Shit!_

_Sorry._

_Tryin’ to turn this thing into a funeral gazebo?_

_I’m so happy. Taako. Marriage is… man. Man. You’re gonna love it. I’m so happy for you._

_Thanks, Mags._

_Can I hold the ring?_

_Yeah, bud. Sure._

_Can I_ make _the ring?_

_You know, not everything you give me has to be made out of wood. Sometimes you can just show up and smile, like a normal person!_

Magnus reaches out and takes his hand. Touches the spot where Taako’s ring will be, come summer. It’s such a silly, specific sort of thing to do. So fixated, but on such an odd detail. But Magnus liked shit like that. Hands and touching and stuff.


End file.
